COOL TECH: Amazon Announces new Kindle DX Today

Later today the folks at Amazon are holding an event to announce their new large screen Kindle DX. Rumor has it the new DX will have a new 9.7 inch screen, better support for PDFs and a better web browser. I have the first Kindle and absolutely love it – bought over 50 books for it and have a ton of fanfiction on it, tried the 2nd version and hated it. I don’t know enough about the new Kindle to pass judgment – I’ll order one and will play with it for a few weeks. But my initial gut reaction, based on the mockups – I don’t like it. I think if they make a larger Kindle that’d be great, but it needs to be wider and not simply “longer.”

The ideal size is 8 1/2 by 11 especially since the point of the new Kindle DX is to target the newspaper reading and college text book crowd. What good is having a longer but narrow screen going to do? Also navigating around the Kindle is a horrible experience, it’s a great device for reading from page to page, but nearly impossible to skip ahead and back to specific points – which is how people use Text Books. But we’ll see what they announce today. I’ll post a follow up after the Press Conference.